A few days ago techtarget published a short interview about the OSU Open Source Lab, where I worked while studying at OSU:
“Lance Albertson, architect and systems administrator at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, uses a sys admin staff of 18-21-year-old undergrads to manage servers for some high-profile, open-source projects (Linux Master Kernel, Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and Drupal to name a few). In this Q&A, Albertson talks about the challenges of using young sys admins and the lab’s plans to move from Cfengine to Puppet for systems management.”
I must say, the work I’ve seen student sys admins do at the OSL is outstanding, and I’ve met some of the sharpest people there I’ve ever worked with. Glad to hear they are still going strong.
Over 600 people was way more than the previous (student) record:
The previous college record was set at the College of William and Mary in Richmond, Va., where 242 people participated in the dance routine that student Kevin Dua organized. Dua’s group beat the previous record of 147 people in an event at a British secondary school.
Here is the official footage of the event:
Of course, this has not been the first attempt to spectacularly perform this music video. Here’s another video of a group of prisoners doing the same thing:
Update: As a commenter points out, the OSU admissions blog has blogged the whole thing too, and provided some HD-quality video of the event, which I have replaced the old video with.
This past valentine’s day a few days ago was not only even cheesier than last year’s (on the radio, they were making up a “Valentine’s Eve” on the 13th already — how long until Valentine’s week, month or year emerge?), it was also the 150th birthday of the State of Oregon. If I had to choose what American state I’d like to be a Citizen of, Oregon would rank pretty high on the list.
After I came back from Whistler, BC, I stopped by in Oregon, where I had the pleasure to be a groomsman at one of my best friends’ wedding: Justin married his Karen.
It was a lot of fun, though I didn’t imagine it being so complicated to get married in this country that you need to rehearse the day before.
Of course, the other guys wanted to set me up to catch the garter, but I got miraculously saved. Needless to say, this is the 21st century, so it’s on youtube:
From my “exchange student” point of view, I have to say, this gave me much deeper insight into American society than any other event I attended here (and I’ve been in the US for a while). It is sad most exchange students have to miss out on this.
PS: I’ve officially worn enough pink that day to last me well through my twenties!
While I was traveling, my mailbox filled up with a few letters, one from the OSU Foundation who I asked to resend their letter because I never received the one they sent me in 2006.
Now I am pretty sure I know why I never got it, because this is how the address part of the letter looks like:
Even if I — friendly as I am — ignore the multiple misspellings of my first name and the random middle initial, one question remains: Who is this mysterious Donna Wenzel?
(As a side note I wonder if there is actually an quasi-namesake out there somewhere who they confused me with.)
Recently, I have to do a lot of point plots for one of my classes, i.e. taking huge amounts of two-dimensional data points, having them “drawn” and printing out the resulting image.
Usually, for this job, I used Maple, mostly because this is my computer algebra system of choice since I used it in my advanced math course in high school. It is just so much better in tedious arithmetic than I am . Writing a little script, I read in the provided data file by the teacher and returned an expression that I could directly copy and paste into Maple. The resulting graphs look somehow like this:
However yesterday, I managed to break Maple. I read in two lists of a few hundred data points each and wanted to plot them together with a function in one plot. So far so bad: In spite of the correct syntax, I got some evaluation errors and an empty plot. Great.
So I tried gnuplot, the apparent “industry standard” for all sorts of scientific data and function plots (unless, of course, you spend a sh*load of money on Matlab ). And, within minutes, thanks to the numerous howtos on the Internet I was able to make much more beautiful (and working) plot such as this one:
And I finally understand why so many people are using it: It is just the right tool for the job.
One tutorial I want to point out in particular are the not so frequently asked questions that helped me a lot to get the trivial, not-so-trivial-after-all tasks done to get a little more sleep and spend a little less time on homework.
Somebody told me recently, this year’s Oregon winter would become colder, yet less wet than what the common Oregonian would call a “usual winter”.
He read it on the internet – therefore it must be true, right?
The current weather at least seems to sustain his theory. Pretty cold hands and ears when riding the bike in the morning, but a relatively dry seat… seems to be much better of a weather for me as a part-time Oregonian! It was even nice enough for me to take a handful of new photos from my “fall at osu series”…
